Stop referring to them as ‘soft skills’

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How often do we hear about the soft skills as "nice to haves" rather than the "must have" skills?

Currently, the competencies that are most usually associated with leadership and organizational management – which are those skills that are knowledge and logic-based – are referred to as the ‘hard skills’. However, for the kind of transformation required in health and social care around the world – to create integrated systems of care – this needs to change.

Leaders with highly evolved soft skills have the ability to capture the hearts and minds of people, understand what is most important to patients and their families, build trust, have difficult conversations, create a shared purpose and guide people along a transformation journey. These soft skills are not the “nice to haves”, rather, they are the required skills for transformation; leading, designing and implementing integrated systems of care requires a strong soft skill base; these are the key competencies that will differentiate technical leaders from adaptive, system leaders.